“I wanted to find out what happened out there, once and for all,” he says. “I felt like I owed it to everyone who’d died that day.”
Another person participating in the Pax investigation was Lauren Moore, an astrophysicist from the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Moore had spent months studying old NASA data about Eros, and she had discovered an interesting anomaly that had been overlooked until then. When she described it to Ko while en route to Eros, he responded with his own conjecture, and the two of them realized that it might provide an explanation for Keith and Jane Wetherill-Owlsley’s disappearance, however far-fetched it might seem. But they didn’t reveal their theory to anyone else; they wouldn’t be able to test it until they reached Eros and went out on the surface for themselves, and they didn’t want to appear foolish if they turned out to be wrong.
Almost five months later, the Gideon rendezvoused with Eros and its lander was sent down to the Ritchie Explorer. Shortly after it docked with the crippled rig, Ko and Lauren put on hardsuits and, along with Gideon’s chief petty officer, Elijah Koons, ventured out on the surface, using the same airlock through which Ko had entered the first time he’d been there. The handful of footprints Ko had spotted were still there, undisturbed in the year that had passed since the Gold Dust Woman had responded to the automated distress signal, and so was the safety line, which the trio followed across Himeros’ basin.
The discarded rope came to an end a hundred yards from the hatch. The footprints continued from there; they were sporadic, an average of six feet apart from one another, and although they were plainly visible now that Himeros was facing the Sun, they would have been easy to miss a year earlier, when that side of Eros had been in the middle of its long night. As both Ko and Lauren anticipated, the footprints led in to the direction of Himeros’s western wall, a little more than a mile away.
Quon, Dr. Moore, and Chief Petty Officer Koons carried extra loops of safety line, which they attached to each other as they made their way across the basin. It soon became clear that there were two sets of footprints, one set less distinct and on a slightly different track, as if one person had run after the other. The trails led to the bottom of the wall, where they suddenly came to a halt at the edge of an oval-shaped area where the regolith appeared to have been recently disturbed (“It looked like where kids had been horsing around in a sandbox,” Lauren would say later). There were a few handprints on the steep wall above the area of disturbance, but the searchers didn’t notice them until later; it was what they saw at the base of the wall that grabbed their attention.
“Sticking up from the ground was a boot,” Ko says. “It was upside-down, and we could see it from the bottom of its sole all the way down to its ankle. It looked like someone had thrown it there, until we got closer and saw another boot beside it, this one buried a bit more deeply. And then we saw that there were legs attached to them.”
This was the surface anomaly that Lauren Moore had learned about from studying old NASA data. As Eros slowly tumbled end-over-end, landslides frequently occurred within its larger craters and depressions. Over time, these landslides would create sand traps that appeared at first glance to be solid ground, but instead were little more than deep pits filled with powdery gray regolith.
“They’re like quicksand, only dry,” Lauren says. “Fall into one of them, and unless you’re attached to a safety line, you’re in a lot of trouble.” A grim smile. “Which is exactly what happened here.”
The legs belonged to Jane Wetherill-Owlsley. She lay upside-down above her husband Keith, who was buried more deeply than she was. Her right hand was grasped within his left hand, and their helmets were less than three feet apart from each other, but they were stuck fast, like two insects caught within dusty gray amber. Their suit batteries were dead and the oxygen supplies were depleted; both of them had suffocated, neither of them able to extricate themselves from the death trap into which they’d fallen.
Now it all came together. Keith Wetherill-Owlsley had unwisely decided to go free-climbing while a drilling operation was in progress. Perhaps he was bored with the monotony of his work; it may have even been possible that no one on the rig, other than his wife, knew what he was doing. Whatever the reason, he’d attempted to make an ascent of Himeros’s western wall, only to lose his grip and slide downhill to the crater floor… where, unknown to him, the sand pit lay waiting.
Hearing his call for help, Jane Wetherill-Owlsley had rushed to rescue her husband. Apparently she’d been on EVA at the same time, probably working on the rig while her husband was goofing off. Since the western wall was beyond reach of her safety rope, she’d released the tether. This decision ultimately doomed both of them, because when she tried to pull her husband out of the pit, there was nothing to prevent him from pulling her in as well, and once both of them were trapped in the pit, they couldn’t get out by themselves.
The crisis hadn’t gone unnoticed in the command center. The rest of the crew had dropped what they were doing to see what was going on. Perhaps they were on the verge of suiting up and going to the rescue. In any case, this was the third and final mistake the crew made, because while all this was taking place, no one was paying attention to the drill. Any warning that they might have had that the laser was about to hit a gas pocket came too late, and the explosion probably killed everyone in the rig almost instantly. The two surviving crew members only lived a little while longer; their suits’ air supplies finally ran out though, and they died together, only a few feet from safety.
Everything could have been avoided. No one had to die that day. But six people lost their lives because stupid things were done in a place where stupidity isn’t easily forgiven.
Quon Ko was one of the co-authors of the final report that revealed the circumstances of the disaster. He continued to serve as a TBSA spacecraft engineer for four more years before taking early retirement. Since then, he has made something of living from the Ritchie Explorer disaster—he has written articles, delivered lectures, and even worked as a consultant on a vid about the tragedy.
To this day, he’s surprised to hear how many people continue to believe that the disaster was the work of a mythical creature. What’s far more incredible, he points out, is the realization that the Explorer’s crew committed three separate errors that, on their own, might have been trivial, but when combined killed everyone on the rig. Nonetheless, some people feel it necessary to believe that an invisible space monster was responsible. He suspects that, for those people, a supernatural cause for the disaster is preferable to one that anyone could commit.
“We spend a lot of time worrying about stuff like the Great Galactic Ghoul,” he says, “but the thing we really should be afraid of is what we do to ourselves. Space monsters don’t exist, really. But careless mistakes will kill you just as quickly.”